


Shifting Tides

by Natasja



Series: Muffinlance spin-off gift-fics [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Changing Attitudes, Cultural Differences, Cultural Sexism, F/M, Gen, Pakku character study, Water Tribe Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-01 09:01:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20812514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Natasja/pseuds/Natasja
Summary: Based off Chapter 33 of MuffinLance's Little Zuko vs The World.The Northern Water Tribe is changing. Pakku doesn't like it, but he knows better than to try and stop it.Kanna's grandchildren are EXACTLY like her, and Pakku can't help feeling that she's laughing at him from across the world. He still won't admit that he might, just a bit, deserve it.





	Shifting Tides

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MuffinLance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuffinLance/gifts).

Pakku would never admit it, but the Southern girl gave him the kind of fight he hadn’t experienced in a while. If she had been a boy, Pakku would have accepted her instantly, with few doubts that she would have become a prized pupil.

Kanna would have _adored_ her.

Pakku ruthlessly quashed that unbidden thought, as he did all memories of his lost love, even as a nagging sense of familiarity nudged at the back of his mind. He had better things to do, between the council and the students who thought that their natural superiority to their sisters automatically made them superior benders. A final whirl of his arms, and spikes of ice trapped the Southern girl, unhurt, but unable to continue bending.

There was a deathly silence from the women and girls watching, hands over mouths and eyes wide. They only relaxed when the girl started to struggle, shouting at him to get back here and finish their fight. Pakku felt a little offended; did they really think that he would kill the girl for being ignorant of her proper place?

He didn’t acknowledge them further, and started to walk away, only to stop dead at a flash of colour at his feet.

A necklace, the ribbon faded with age but the pendant as clear as the day he had carved it, the brilliant shades a stark contrast against the white snow. The rare, precious dye from the squid-molluscs that he had spent months collecting personally - how Kanna had laughed at his drenched, stained clothing! The carving of Polar Bear-Goose bone, that had taken most of a femur before he finally got it right, and half of another before he was satisfied with the result.

He never told Kanna how long he worked on her necklace. Men were supposed to be good at carving, as well as bending, and Pakku hated admitting when he struggled. Acting insulted when someone questioned how long it took was a far better tactic.

Hesitantly, he picked the necklace up, brushing away the snow before it could stain the ribbon further.

Had Kanna set it aside when she married, or traded it for passage south, only for these children to pick it up at a market? Had it been plundered from her corpse, or inherited upon her death? Pakku wanted desperately to know, and at the same time, dreaded confirmation. “This… is my necklace.”

The Southern girl’s eyes blazed… and how had he not seen it before? She was the image of Kanna, before she vanished. The fury and ice of a blizzard in her eyes and her voice, shouting at him that he had time to negotiate with her father and carve a necklace, but not to ask what she thought about marrying him.

The girl was shouting too, but her words were so much white noise in his mind, consumed with the trinket he held. The ice-spikes fell away, and Pakku didn’t care that he hadn’t lost control like that since he was a boy. “I made this sixty years ago, for the love of my life. For Kanna.”

For the woman whose name he hadn’t spoken in longer than this girl’s parents had been alive.

The crowd remained silent. A few of the spectators, who disapproved of him validating the - _Katara’s_ arguments by fighting her at all, looked sympathetic. Katara didn’t.

She snatched the necklace back from his slack grip, fastening it around her neck, as angry and distant as Kanna had been in the aftermath of their last fight, when he had snapped that he expected more obedience when they were married. Kanna had been discovered missing the next morning, her betrothal gifts very pointedly left on her bed, along with a torn-up marriage contract.

His once-betrothed had never been one for mixed messages, and it seemed that trait had been passed on to her granddaughter.

Katara retrieved her knife - and perhaps mixing weapons with bending was something he should trial with his less-incompetent students - and wrapped her arms around the Fire Nation prince who had somehow escaped his guards **again** and was frantically checking her for injury. The Fire brat got reassuring hugs and strokes of his hair and gentle, soothing words.

_Pakku_ got a final, freezing glare. “No wonder she left you.”

* * *

Pakku sent a message for his class to finish practicing their forms, then went home and stayed there.

He skipped dinner in favour of contemplation, the kind he hadn’t engaged in for too long. Not since Kanna had been there to challenge him and make him question, often just to be contrary. Or so he had thought.

But that wasn’t fair, either. Why should it have been **Kanna’s** responsibility to make the man whose authority she would have been subjected to, better? Respect and affection were not demanded, but earned, and Pakku had never seen the need to prove himself worthy of either. Not even to the woman he loved.

It was traditional for men to fight and women to heal, but was there truly proof that one could not be both, or was it just an excuse to justify tradition? Certainly Katara hadn’t had many problems with combat bending, and Yugoda had been raving about her gift as a beginning healer. Pakku had read one of her works on Chi paths, and there had been nothing in it about restrictions on the uses of bending.

Pakku was a Waterbending Master, a Senior Member of the Order of the White Lotus. Masters were meant to push the limits of what was possible, to discover new things for the next generation. _Why_ had Pakku never tried to prove exactly how mixing bending styles was bad, if only as a warning to his students, who seemed as intent on finding new ways to hurt themselves as they were on learning to master their element?

In this new bout of brutal self-examination, he had to admit that it was because he hadn’t wanted to.

As long as Tradition was all-important, Kanna had been wrong to leave him. If women were unsuited to fight, then men were justified in their superiority. If outside interference was dangerous, then the North was correct to isolate themselves, even when the South asked for help.

Pretty excuses, to justify his sins.

Perhaps, if the Southern children ever deigned to talk to him, he could discover Kanna’s fate, and even go down to visit her. But for Kanna to be willing to do anything more than shove him into the harbour, however, he needed to be more than the arrogant protegee she remembered. He needed to change, starting with Kanna’s grandchildren.

* * *

Even under torture, Pakku would never admit it out loud, but the Avatar had been right.

Katara was a fighter, one with more ingenuity and passion and ruthlessness than most of his male students put together, coupled with less than a tenth of their ego. Of course, she was Kanna’s grand-daughter. Being a force of nature bound up in the body of a girl was practically a given.

But it wasn’t just Katara proving centuries of custom wrong. More girls joined, with bending tricks that Pakku had never seen or learned, most of those trick suited to combat, and with a terrifiying willingness to use them. _Worse_, his female students were cheerfully trading lessons among themselves. His male students were starting to fall behind, the girls teaching each other as much as they learned from him, and most of them now competent with a knife, thanks to Katara.

If only the boys would react by putting more thought and effort into their lessons, or shelving their pride long enough to ask to learn from the girls, instead of spitting insults at the ones outclassing them.

Even before his change of heart, Pakku would have punished the boy for speaking so; youth was no excuse for incivility. Besides, the women were experienced enough to teach the basics of Waterbending without him; the last thing Pakku wanted was for them to go and set up their own classes, with all of the interesting tricks they had developed on their own initiative. Pakku refused to miss out on teaching such promising students because a few inexperienced boys couldn't keep their mouths shut.

Kanna would be _so proud _of the girls. Especially her grand-daughter.

Was it too late to send her a letter? Would she read it, or burn the paper as soon as she saw that it was from him? If she did read it, would she be willing, or even able, to respond?

It was useless to speculate. Kanna had run from him for a reason, and he had yet to win her grandchildren’s regard, much less hers. If Pakku wanted her to give him so much as the time of day, then he needed to become someone worthy of her respect.

Tomorrow.

Tonight, he had an appointment to take out his irritation on some of their captive Firebenders.

**Author's Note:**

> I am always down for girl power and getting rid of entrenched sexism, so after I stopped laughing at MuffinLance's latest chapter, this popped into my head.  
Pakku isn't a BAD guy, just one who never questioned the culture he grew up with. When he's given a reason to change, and faced with proof that keeping to the old ways is counterproductive, he'll go along with it.


End file.
